


Finding the Words

by starash (TARDIS_stowaway)



Category: Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Genre: Bad Poetry, Character Study, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2002-07-20
Updated: 2002-07-20
Packaged: 2017-10-17 20:04:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,778
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/180701
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TARDIS_stowaway/pseuds/starash
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After regaining his soul, Spike turns to writing poetry.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Finding the Words

**Author's Note:**

> Spoilers for all of S6, originally written prior to S7. Warning for cursing and poetry, some of it deliberately very bad.
> 
> This was my first fanfic ever to see the light of the internet, written back when I was primarily a fandom lurker. I'm posting it here for archival completion and because I think it's interesting to see how authors have grown and changed (or failed to change).

_My heinous past deeds fill me with despair  
For my lost conscience has emerged from the ether._

No, no, no!  They're just getting worse, damn it all.  That last bit doesn't even rhyme properly.  But I can't stop.  I've got to keep putting words on paper until I find the right ones, the words that will make my universe make sense again.

About 1965, I ran into Angel in a bar in some tiny Alabama town.  Dru and I were on a road trip-she wanted to go to Florida and eat an astronaut "to see if they taste of stars"-and we stopped to rest and eat something.  (God, how careless we were with lives in those days!)  She was holed up in the motel while I went out for a beer.  Don't ask me what Angel was doing there; he never said.  I walked into the only bar in town and found my estranged grandsire.  Nearly walked out again, but I wanted a beer.  Things were tense, but neither of us was going to be the first to give in and leave.  Anyway, we both ended up roaring drunk.  He got into weepy confessional mode and started lecturing me about what he felt when the Gypsies first cursed him with a soul.  He described the remorse that hits you like physical pain, the self-loathing that makes you want to crawl in a hole and never show your face again, and the gut-wrenching helplessness that consumes you because nothing you do can ever bring back the hundreds of people who died at your fangs.  I have abruptly become far too familiar with those sensations.  I'm as used to agony–physical and emotional–as anybody, but this business of a restored soul is something else entirely.  A body's got to have an outlet.  Angel's was to take it out on himself physically.  He spent the first six months after leaving our gang with his new soul wearing crucifix necklaces, hammering nails into his hands, that sort of thing.  That night in Alabama I laughed and laughed.  The mental image of defanged Angel, morose and bleeding from self-inflicted wounds, was as  funny as a cartoon character walking off a cliff.  How could anybody be so bloody stupid?  Killing is what vampires do.  Remorse is for the weak-minded living, I thought then.

God has a perverse sense of humor.  I bet that very night He sat in heaven and plotted how to make me eat my words.

"Heh heh," he thought, " I'll give this Spike bloke a soul of his own, but I'll make him seek it voluntarily! Hmmm, I can make him do that if I make him fall madly in love with a Slayer.  Before that, I'll make him incapable of hurting people, just for kicks.  Heh, heh, this'll be fun." 

Maybe God doesn't snicker like that, but I wouldn't count on it.

Still, I haven't completely followed in my Grandsire's footsteps.  Maybe there's some fundamental difference in our personalities-hell, what am I talking about? Personality-wise, that wanker and I have about as much in common as a sea cucumber shares with a tiger. Anyway, maybe it's that personality difference, or maybe it's that my body is quite mangled enough from the trials.  Whatever the cause, I don't feel compelled to poke holes in myself.  Not that I don't deserve it, mind you.  I deserve to be locked up in a room with a pissed-off Glory and a full selection of exotic kitchen tools.  I deserve to skinny dip in a lake of Holy Water.  But self-mutilation won't undo a single wrong I've done.  Nothing can.  So, since the guilt is too fresh and overpowering to simply be borne, I must try to express it.  My soul makes itself known in an irresistible need to write poetry.  I suppose it's my own self-torture, striving for a masterpiece that will help me make sense of my past and future but producing only shit.

Over a century ago they called me William the Bloody because the poetry that love compelled me to write was so bloody awful.  I never wrote a line of verse after Drusilla turned me.  The poetry was linked to being bullied and rejected; I wanted no part of it.  Not sure I could have written if I'd wanted to:  poetry, however abysmal, comes from the soul.  Now I've taken my soul back voluntarily.  Would I have done the same if I knew I'd have to write again?  Would I have done it if I had really understood the agony of knowing right from wrong and finding myself in the latter category?  (I thought I knew guilt even without a soul because of what I've done to Buffy.  That guilt was real, but that is to the guilt a soul gives what a candle is to a wildfire.  The candle may sting, but the wildfire swallows you whole.)  Would I have had the courage? 

Of course.  It's for Buffy.  Girl deserves someone less apt to difficult mornings after than Angel, more committed than Riley, and less evil than I was.  I can't go back and face her now, understanding what I've done, how I hurt her.  But I'd choose the soul again in a heartbeat.  I've got to pass through this deepest despair to see if there's hope on the other side, because there sure wasn't any where I started.  I spilled the last of my hope out in Buffy's bathroom, and it flowed down the drain and was gone.  So I write:

 _Accusing faces stare out at me  
From beyond Time's locked glass door:  
Their blood coats a full century  
And seeps onto the bathroom floor._

Fuck it.  You'd think that over a hundred years of existence would have taught me something, but all it's done is make my poetry more gruesome.  I still can't make the words on the paper express the maelstrom in my head.  Things used to be so clear:  I loved Dru, she loved me, we killed people, and it was fun. The rest of the world was mere details.  Then Buffy came and whisked away my world with a flick of her deceptively delicate hand.  Nothing makes sense anymore.  I swore I would kill her, chip or no chip, and then I fell for her.  I swore I'd never harm her, but I tried to violate her.  Finally I swore that I'd reclaim my soul to be worthy of her, but all that's done is show me that I'm unworthy even to look at her.  Everything is falling to pieces.

A memory leaps up:

 _Turning and turning in the widening gyre  
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;  
Things fall apart, the centre cannot hold;  
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world._

Not my words, those.  Far too skillful.  It's "The Second Coming" by Yeats.  I can't seem to distill truth into words that way, except perhaps the occasional phrase that spills from my lips in conversation, without warning or hope of repetition.

An idea sparks.  My poetry hasn't improved since I wrote as a human; perhaps that's because I'm still trying to write in the style of a nancy-boy Victorian.  I have no idea what I am anymore, but it's bloody well not that.  New styles have arisen and old rules have been abandoned.  Perhaps I should take a cue from Yeats and the rest of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries and try free verse.  Don't know why I didn't think of that sooner.  I may not have written anything since horses were still the dominant means of transportation, but I've read enough modern poetry. Not being able to go anywhere in daylight leaves a lot of free time, and before I got my own telly I used to spend any time not with Drusilla reading.  It's my one human habit I never did break or twist.  Now I write:

 _You come, a shining ray  
(both matter and  
energy, you are particle  
and you are wave.  
You break against me.)  
and you illuminate  
my comfortable darkness.  
Light reveals shadows,  
menacing the edges  
of perception._

 _I put on my glasses  
(long-abandoned lenses  
scarcely fit anymore:  
my head swelled in the darkness)  
and the shadows resolve  
into necks.  
Hundreds, thousands of necks-  
pierced, broken, mangled-  
and on the necks are heads.  
The heads have eyes  
in which I see my reflection  
(oh hellish miracle!):  
I am loathsome and amorphous.  
Monster?  Man?  No image holds,  
except:_

 _I am a thicket  
with bloodied thorns;  
I am burning in your light.  
I am scorched earth, singed spectacles,  
and a green tender shoot  
reaching towards your golden waves._

There.  That poem, I think, was better.  I don't trust my judgment of my own work.  I wrote drivel for Cecily and thought I transcribed the depth and breadth of love.  I created poetry in violence and thought my crimson Muse spoke all the Truth in the world. Perhaps I am equally wrong now.  Still, I feel as if I have finally created something worthwhile.  That last poem may mix its metaphors left and right, but it's a world away than anything that came before.  The word "epiphany" takes on new resonance.  This is just the tip of the iceberg, the first drops out of the floodgate.  I am full of words, and I am going to learn to pick out which ones are good, real, and true. Another phrase from the same Yeats poem stirs in my mind, out of context and imbued with new meaning: __

 _And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,  
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?_   
_  
_

I am not Shakespeare or Yeats.  I am a rough beast; I am Spike; I am William.  I have been neither a good poet nor a good man, but I am striving for rebirth as someone better.  I cannot and will not abolish my well-deserved pain, but I have begun to express it and sooner or later it will cease to own me.  When I am ready, I will return to Sunnydale with the way to tell Buffy of my love and remorse.  She will choose whether to take me back, but if she refuses it shall not be because she cannot trust me.  I will make myself as trustworthy as anything in this world.  That may not be much, but maybe it's enough.

Buffy, you once told me that I was beneath you.  I tried to prove you wrong, but now I see that you were right all along.  You soar so high above me!  Yet things have changed:  I won back my soul.  I am still beneath you, but now, word by word, I ascend.


End file.
